At this season, when, for a few days, the great liturgies of the Passion and Resurrection take precedence over everything else, I am driven, as my years go by, to think more and more about linear and cyclical time. I look back to previous Easters, quite a long series of them by now. I am older and changed, and they are all irretrievably lost to me. But I am also back where I was. Easter is always the same: the liturgy does not change, and, for the believer, that liturgy cuts across linear time, to those very moments of the Passion and Resurrection. With every new Easter, I am back at all the ones I have celebrated before, and I am at the foot of the Cross and at the empty tomb. And I look to the beginning and end of all things. It is the same with the Passover: every year is, at the Seder table, both that very year of the flight from Egypt, and that last year just before the next year in Jerusalem.
Whether one considers oneself “religious” or not, to be human is to live in both cyclical and linear time. The world we have been give in cyclical: earth and the heavenly spheres revolve, and make time by their revolutions. There is day and night; winter, spring, summer and fall; birth and death. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun”, says the Preacher. Upon the world’s cycles, we build whole architectures of symbols. Even without a liturgy, there is the school year and the work year; Christmas and birthdays and the summer holidays; the joyful rites for a new baby, and the mourning for a death. We know what will happen, in the cycle of every year and every life, and we bring order by doing always the same things in response to each turn of the wheel.
Upon the world’s cycles, we build whole architectures of symbols.
But each of us—each man and woman, each family, each society—also has a story. Even peoples who lived without writing and history had a time-before-time, when their story began. Birth and death are a cycle, but they are also a beginning and an end. We do not merely spin from Christmas to Christmas, Easter to Easter, birthday to birthday. We grow older—wiser or more foolish, sadder or more glad—and every chapter differs from the one before. To make sense of our lives is not just to impose symbols on its cycles, but also to see some through-way from beginning to end.
In the opening lines of ‘The Four Quartets’, T. S. Eliot writes:
“If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable”.
Puzzling words, but perhaps Eliot was pointing to the necessity of both cyclical and linear time. On their own, each constitutes a sort of eternal present. If time is only cyclical, we are always back where we started: every moment is superimposed on all its past iterations, and I have no story. But if time is merely linear, there is nothing but the now. Nothing links this Easter to the last; this birthday to all my years gone by: again, I have no story.
On their own, cyclical and linear time each constitute a sort of eternal present.
“All time is unredeemable”—here Eliot was certainly thinking of St Paul: “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil”. To “redeem” is to buy back, to retrieve what one has lost. What is more hopelessly and forever lost than time? Nothing can buy back one instant of it. Yet if time truly is both circle and line—if we really can come back to Easter each year, and if we really can each of us have a story—then, for all the sorrow and regret they must bring, the days are not merely evil, and even time can be redeemed.
